Senior Product Leader

Senior Product Leader

AthleteOne | Remote - U.S. | Full-Time

About AthleteOne

AthleteOne is a leading youth sports technology company providing comprehensive solutions for clubs, leagues, and events. Deeply established in the competitive soccer market, we are aggressively expanding into new sports verticals.

Our platform does more than manage back-office operations, it connects the entire youth sports ecosystem. From robust billing and club management tools to player profiles that assist with college recruitment, we are building the digital infrastructure for the next generation of athletes.

The Nitty Gritty of This Role

We are a small, focused team operating in a growth-stage environment. You will have a small product support team reporting to you, and you will work alongside a lean group of hybrid product/sales folks…but this is not a large, layered org. There is no program management support, no research team, and no one to hand off the "details" to. You will be the senior product voice for this vertical, and that means you will operate at every altitude, from writing user stories in the morning to facilitating a roadmap review with the CTO in the afternoon to following up on a billing edge case at the end of day.

If that sounds like exactly the kind of ownership you have been waiting for, read on.

This is a role for someone who has earned their stripes in a real environment, who has shipped products that matter, navigated technical tradeoffs, pushed back on bad ideas (including their manager's), and built process where none existed. We are not looking for someone who manages the work. We are looking for someone who owns it.

What You Will Own

Product Strategy & Roadmap

• Define and own the product vision for the League, Club & Event vertical, with a primary focus on billing, payments, and financial management workflows.
• Translate business goals into a clear, prioritized roadmap, willing to defend every prioritization call with data and reasoning.
• Balance investment across maintaining existing features, fixing what is broken, and building what drives growth.
• Define product KPIs that ladder directly to company OKRs. Build reporting that gives leadership real signal, not vanity metrics.

Customer & Market Focus

• Engage directly with customers: club directors, league administrators, parents. Not through a research team. You.
• Validate requirements against real workflows and real pain points. Build conviction before committing engineering resources.
• Be the internal expert on the end-to-end user journey, from a parent paying dues to a player using recruiting tools.

Technical Collaboration

• Partner closely with Engineering leadership throughout the full development lifecycle.
• Work within Agile/Scrum frameworks to translate business requirements into clear problem statements and well-scoped user stories that engineering can execute against.
• Bridge business requirements and technical constraints
• Participate in technical feasibility discussions and understand the tradeoffs well enough to make informed roadmap decisions. You do not need to read and write code. It helps though if you can tell when a proposed engineering plan and scope estimate do not add up.

Program Management & Execution

• We do not have a dedicated Program Management team. You will need to see across the full execution picture: dependencies between Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and Finance; risks that could jeopardize timelines; and the connection between what gets shipped and how it lands in market.
• You will not be doing this alone. Leadership carries this burden alongside you. But you should be someone who naturally thinks this way, who notices when a launch is missing a go-to-market plan, or when an engineering delivery has a downstream dependency nobody has talked about yet. The goal is a product leader who can zoom out to the program level when it matters.

What We Are Looking For

8+ Years of Product Management Experience.

With clear progression into senior or lead roles (whether your title caught up or not) and at least one experience owning a product area or vertical end-to-end, from strategy through execution. At least 3–4 of those years in a SaaS or B2B software environment. Experience with billing, payments, or fintech platforms is highly desirable.

You Have Built Process Where There Was None.

You have joined an environment where the roadmap lived in someone's head and the discovery process was "let's see what the customer says." You built structure without making it bureaucracy, and you did it while still shipping.

Startup Mindset.

Not "I read about lean startup." You have worked in a resource-constrained environment where you wore multiple hats, made hard calls with incomplete information, and kept moving. You did not wait for perfect conditions.

Program Management Is a Skill for You.

You have managed complex, cross-functional initiatives without formal authority. You track dependencies, manage timelines, and coordinate across teams without letting things fall through the cracks, because you built the system that catches them.

You Can Influence Without Authority.

Engineering, Sales, Finance. You have learned how to build trust, communicate trade-offs clearly, and earn alignment rather than demand it.

Technical Acumen That Earns Engineer Respect.

You do not need to write code, but you can review a Jira epic, understand high level technical design implications, and ask the right questions during a sprint planning session. Engineers should want to work with you, not around you.

Data-Driven Without Being Data-Paralyzed.

You know how to measure product health, churn, adoption, revenue impact. You use data to inform decisions, not to avoid making them.

Clear, Direct Communicator.

You can translate a complex technical trade-off into a one-paragraph executive summary. You are equally comfortable in an engineering standup and a board-level product review.

AI as a Force Multiplier.

We expect this role to leverage AI tools for research, documentation, competitive analysis, user story drafting, and more. Not because it is trendy, but because a team our size needs every advantage it can get. We are not looking for an AI expert, nor are we looking to replace people with machines. We are looking for someone intellectually curious enough to use the best tools available and confident enough to build their own workflows around them.

Preferred

• Experience in the youth sports, recreation, or adjacent industry
• Hands-on experience with billing or payment platforms (e.g., Stripe) and familiarity with subscription and recurring revenue models
• Bachelor's degree in Business, Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience that made the degree irrelevant

Why This Role

This is a foundational hire. You will have direct access to engineering leadership and executive leadership. The decisions you make will shape the product direction of the company's core vertical. There is no layer of bureaucracy between your ideas and their implementation.

If you want to own something real and grow with it, this is that opportunity.